I'm Tech Lead at GetHuman, creating a better customer service experience so you can get more from the products and services you use everyday.
I build mobile/web applications, workflow automation, data pipeline, and machine learning that give superpowers to our experts so they can solve more problems faster.

From 2007-2010 I founded and ran RallyPlan, a bootstrap startup that mined Twitter data using NLP algorithms and machine learning to help people discover social events. From 1998-2007 I built data management and business intelligence systems as engineer at Microstrategy and SAS Institute.

I live in Cambridge, MA with my wife and three kids.

Current Work

GetHuman - Consumer Internet (2015 - present)

Software Engineering Tech Lead

I'm creating a better customer service experience so you can get more from the products and services you use everyday.
I build mobile/web applications, workflow automation, data pipeline, and machine learning that give superpowers to our experts so they can solve more problems faster.

Projects

GetHuman - Consumer Internet (2015 - present)

Software Engineering Tech Lead

I'm creating a better customer service experience so you can get more from the products and services you use everyday.
I build mobile/web applications, workflow automation, data pipeline, and machine learning that give superpowers to our experts so they can solve more problems faster.

Scratch - Consumer E-commerce (2015)

Web and Mobile UI Development

Matt Zisow, Chris Howes, Philippe Bosshart, and I developed and launched expert shopping service Scratch, funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, in late 2014 and early 2015. We built iOS and web consumer apps plus internal research, curation and analytics technology using a Javascript-oriented approach that includes Angular.js, Ionic Framework, Node.js, Firebase, ElasticSearch, and PostgreSQL.

FinMason - Portfolio Risk Management (2014)

Web Application UI Development

I organized a two-person team to build the initial web UI for financial services startup Finmason. We worked closely with Founder/CEO Kendrick Wakeman and the engineering team on a very aggressive timeline to build a comprehensive HTML5 single-page web app based on Angular.js with a build process involving Node.js, Bower.js, Broccoli.js, Less CSS preprocessing, etc. The application involves data visualization for portfolio risk management.

Invite Education - College Planning (2013-2014)

Product Management, Design, and Development for Consumer Web and SaaS

I work with the founders of education technology startup Invite Education to translate their vision - a better college planning experience for families - into a successful product. I organized a three-person team to design and build the initial version of the product, which launched privately in February 2014 and continues to exceed sales expectations. The product makes use of the Ruby on Rails and Angular frameworks and the D3 data visualization library.

Founder

As a father of three kids under five it's my job to stay informed about developments in the field of early childhood parenting. I've found it too difficult to do this job - learning what's new in education, health, technology, media, etc. - while juggling all of the other massive commitments of being an engaged parent.

My thesis is that there are a lot of other parents out there that have this problem and that an easily-consumed weekly email with summaries of the key news stories and other hand-picked gems helpful to parents will be a valuable solution. To deliver this product I'm developing curation software that I use to filter content from thousands of sources, identifying the key trends and high-quality ideas that are moving the discipline of parenting forward.

If you're an active parent or care-provider for kids between zero and six years old, I encourage you to subscribe to Parent.Cc

Rednote - Audio Emoticon For Text Messaging (2013)

Lead Developer

I led the product development team for Rednote, and early-stage startup making it possible for people to share short streams of music as a part of the mobile text messaging experience.

We used Node.js, MongoDB, Javascript, HTML, and CSS to develop an improved version of Rednote's HTML5 music sharing experience that's deployed to hundreds of thousands of users in the Heywire Messaging App.

Gen.js - Javascript Library for Generative Art (2013)

Creator

A goal for 2013 is to create an interactive story that the kids and I will love doing together. A first step toward that goal is getting up to speed with tools available for graphics and animation. Not having a lot of skill/experience as a graphic designer, I'm looking at ways to write code that will produce the visuals for the experience.

While there are great javascript libraries available for drawing, animation, game development, etc. already out there, I couldn't find the tools I wanted to do generative art, where algorithms make many of the decisions normally made by the artist, and couldn't find tools designed to produce the painterly aesthetic that I wanted. So I started build a set of tools myself. Learn more about Gen.js.

Aquto - Early-stage Mobile Startup (2012)

UI / UX Developer for Initial Consumer Multi-Platform Mobile App

Led initial front-end development of Kickbit, an iOS/Android mobile app for early-stage startup Aquto - funded by North Bridge Venture Partners and Matrix Partners - that is pioneering mobile carrier plan data as form of virtual good/currency, making mobile data more affordable for consumers.

Working with a UI/UX designer and another developer, I designed and implemented initial build/tooling/workflow process for supporting wide range of device platforms (iOS, Android, web, etc.). I defined and implemented the initial application architecture, played a strong role in UI/UX design, and helped define/implement customer development and usability testing.

Co-Founder, UI / UX and Node.js API Developer for Initial Product

The fifth employee at Connected Sports (backed by Avalon Ventures) I was the primary developer for the Javascript / HTML5 front-end for the company's first version of the Rumble Football product and built much of the supporting Node.js REST API. A social 2nd screen companion game experience for watching NFL on TV, Rumble Football involved real-time communication using Web Sockets and Socket.io, use of the Backbone front-end framework, JQuery, JQuery UI, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and Redis.

Fitgiver - Earn Money for Charity When You Workout (2011)

Part-time UI / UX and Node.js API Developer for Startup Side-Project

Helped build initial HTML5 UI / UX and Node.js backend for a consumer mobile web app that won the social good category at AngelHack Boston in 2011. Established the Node.js Wrapper for Runkeeper Health Graph API open source project.

Swoop (formerly Shopximity) - Mobile Ad Network (2011)

Javascript SDK Developer for Initial Product

Rally - Social Planning and Events Startup (2009 - 2010)

Founder, CTO, Designer and Developer

I created a service called Touted.com in 2009 to aggregate Twitter conversation about local businesses to help consumers discover the best bars, restaurants, etc. nearby. The service pivoted to become Rally and focus on the long-tail of local events to help people make casual plans with friends.

Rally mined Twitter for content related to the future, extracting data about date, location, event, people involved, conversation thread, etc to build a calendar of future events in users' social graphs. The main user experience was a daily email that aided last-minute planning. While the daily email was successful among initial users (5% daily clickthrough rate), attempts to discover a workable distribution model failed, and the service was shut down in 2011.

I designed and developed all aspects of the Rally product, from email and web user experiences to Python / Django API with Twitter Streaming API integration, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Amazon AWS, etc.

Founder, CTO, Designer and Developer

I founded Likematter in 2008 to help people discover relevant news and job listings on the web. Likematter built profiles of personal interests from favorited content like bookmarks, blogs (OPML), etc., crawled the web for current news and job listings, and the recommended highly relevant new content using machine learning and natural language processing based on the OpenCalais entity extraction platform.

I led a 2-4 person team developing natural language processing and machine learning algorithms in Python and a Javascript/HTML/CSS UI / UX for personalized news and jobs discovery.